At INFODAD, we rank everything we review with plus signs, on a scale from one (+) [disappointing] to four (++++) [definitely worth considering]. We mostly review (+++) or better items. Very rarely, we give an exceptional item a fifth plus. We are independent reviewers and, as parents, want to help families learn which books, music, and computer-related items we and our children love...or hate. INFODAD is a service of TransCentury Communications, Inc., Fort Myers, Florida, infodad@gmail.com.

Striking photographs and
straightforward text combine to provide young readers with fascinating
information on such animals as elephants and dolphins – and even the more-mundane
ducks and rabbits – in a variety of attractive new books. A Baby Elephant in the Wild features remarkable photos of a
just-born elephant calf – remarkable because witnessing an elephant birth in
the animals’ natural habitat is rare. Caitlin O’Connell, who has studied
elephants for more than two decades, focuses on the new baby, Liza, using her
to tell young readers what elephants are like from birth through their early
life. O’Connell explains that Liza weighs 250 pounds at birth and will double
in weight within three months. Then, with spare text and plenty of fascinating
photos taken by herself and Timothy Rodwell, O’Connell shows how elephant herds
protect and care for babies, and explains the challenges that even the largest
land animal faces – from lions to poachers and deforestation. O’Connell is
writing for very young children and does not delve deeply into these issues,
but she also does not simplify or sugar-coat them, noting, for example, that
elephants “could eat a small farmer’s whole crop in one night, leaving the
farmer’s family with no food for the year. This makes sharing land with
elephants difficult for farmers.” Most of the book, though, is strictly about
the elephants themselves, not their relationship with humans. O’Connell
includes such interesting information as the fact that elephants continue to
grow throughout their lives and that their closest land relative is a small
rodent called the rock dassie. Most of the book’s considerable attraction,
though, comes from the chance to see elephants in their native habitat – and
observe how they care for the youngest members of their herds.

The story of dolphins in a
Scholastic “Discover More” book also features photos of the animals in the
wild, but this book’s structure is quite different. Like all the works in this
series, it is a highly visual introduction to its topic, with tidbits of
information scattered around pages dominated by multiple photos. As in
O’Connell’s book, there is a lot to learn here, ranging from the fact that
dolphin pods normally have 15 to 20 members to the observation that the orca,
one of the greatest enemies of dolphins, is in fact the biggest dolphin of them
all. There are 42 kinds of dolphins, and this book shows pictures of many of
them, including river dolphins (smaller than ocean dolphins but with longer
snouts – and sometimes colored pink) and the recently discovered Burrunan
dolphin (found in Australian waters). As with the story of elephants, that of
dolphins includes references to the animals’ relationship with humans – both
positive and negative. But in this book too, the focus is on the animals rather
than on people, and the fascinating photos are the best part by far, showing
dolphins herding fish into a tight ball so they can pick them off more easily,
using clicks and whistles to communicate, tending their calves, and playing
games such as chase and catch (using a piece of seaweed). Young readers will
have a new appreciation of these intelligent water-dwelling mammals after
reading this book – and can learn even more from a free digital companion book
available for download by entering a code found in the printed work.

The animals are more-common
ones and the photos are intended to provide an “aww” factor of cuteness rather than
to communicate substantial information in two books from Random House’s “Phoebe
Dunn Collection”: The Little Duck, originally
published in longer form in 1976, and The
Little Rabbit, which dates to 1980 and has also been abridged for this new
edition. The new board-book versions of these books retain all the works’
charm. The duck is seen hatching, growing bit by bit, sitting on the family
dog’s back, interacting with a chicken, rabbit and goat, and eventually
encountering a girl duck and swimming happily with her in a pond. The text here
is thin, trying for an anthropomorphized story about Henry the duck searching
for a friend, but the toddlers at whom the book is aimed will have more fun
with the photos than with the story the pictures are supposed to be
illustrating. The same is true for The
Little Rabbit, in which a girl named Sarah has a bunny named Buttercup that
she loves – but one day in the meadow, Sarah falls asleep and Buttercup wanders
away, encountering a turtle and butterfly before it starts to rain and the
bunny runs for cover and becomes “stuck between some stalks.” Sarah soon
rescues her and all ends happily, in a book that does not even attempt to
provide as much information on a rabbit’s life as The Little Duck provides about a duckling’s – but that is every bit
as warm and heartfelt.

And speaking of warmth,
Olivier Dunrea’s entirely fictional books about goslings are just as cute and
sweet as anything in the “Phoebe Dunn Collection.” But they are books drawn as
well as written by Dunrea – nothing photographic here. Jasper & Joop: A Perfect Pair—One Tidy, One Messy, originally
published last year, is just as much fun now that it is available in board-book
form. The simple story of two best-friend goslings, one “who likes to be tidy”
and one “who likes to be messy,” features predictable minor mishaps with
puddles, piglets, mud, chicks and, eventually, a beehive, into which Joop just
has to poke his bill – resulting in a madcap chase, through which Jasper learns
that being messy is sometimes necessary and not really so bad, while Joop finds
out that getting cleaned up is also no big deal. The goslings have so much fun
together that it is easy to see why they are best friends despite their
differing personalities – which is, of course, exactly the point that Dunrea is
making in this gentle, amusing little fable, with which parents will have a
fine time entertaining infants and children up to around age three.

Here are two
coming-of-spring books for kids ages 3-7 – but not just any kids. Ten Eggs in a Nest
is a “Bright and Early” book, which means its simple story is written in
super-simple and repetitive language, the aim being to have parents read the
book to young children – who will then become intrigued by the pictures and the
large, easy-to-read words, and will use the book as a springboard to reading on
their own. This is a “don’t count your chickens before they hatch” book with an
amusing twist that turns it into a counting book as well. The easy-to-follow
story line has Red Rooster excited about becoming a father after Gwen the hen
lays eggs – but Gwen says it’s bad luck to count the eggs before they hatch, so
Red Rooster doesn’t know how many chicks there will be. When one pecks its way
through the shell of its egg, Red goes to the market to buy the chick a worm.
But then two more chicks appear – Red needs two more worms. And then three
additional chicks show up, and then four more, so Red goes to the market again
and again, his trips described in virtually the same language each time, making
it easy for pre-readers and the youngest readers to follow along. Eventually
Red, Gwen and their 10 chicks start to settle into their nest and, of course,
everything ends happily, providing young children with a pleasant platform for
an early reading adventure.

Intended specifically for
Jewish children in the same age range, Max
Makes a Cake is about the springtime celebration of Passover – which
coincides, in Max’s house, with his mother’s birthday. Max and his father want
to make a surprise birthday cake for Mommy, but baby Trudy keeps acting up, so
Daddy has to leave the kitchen to settle her down for a nap. Max waits as
patiently as he can, until he finally can stand it no more and decides to
create a cake by himself. Since he cannot use the oven on his own – but, this
being Passover, there is plenty of matzoh around – Max concocts a matzoh-based
cake with frosting made from cream cheese and jam. Of course, the cake is a big
success, and everything ends well; and the book weaves information on Passover,
matzoh, the biblical story of the Jews’ flight from Egypt, and the Four
Questions asked at the seder meal into the cake-making story. There is even a
recipe for the matzoh-based cake at the end. Jewish families are clearly the expected
audience for this book, although non-Jewish parents wanting an
easy-to-understand introduction to Jewish traditions for their children’s
Jewish friends will find it enjoyable as well. The cake-making story is simply
told and simply illustrated, and the back of the book provides a one-paragraph
version of the Passover tale. However, the Four Questions asked at the seder
table, to which the cake story refers and which are also mentioned at the
book’s end, are never given in full or explained, limiting the book’s
usefulness as a teaching tool. As a result, Max
Makes a Cake is more for fun than for learning.

The 13th volume
in Naxos’ excellent series of the music of John Philip Sousa proves yet again,
if more proof were necessary, that the “march king” was far more than a maker
of marches. It also proves yet again that his quintessentially American music
has considerable international resonance – something Sousa himself showed
during his band’s many world tours and something that conductor Keith Brion is
now demonstrating by conducting a series of bands outside the United States.
This time, instead of the Royal Swedish Navy Band heard on the last two volumes
or the Royal Norwegian Navy Band heard on the two before those, Brion conducts
the United Kingdom’s Central Band of the RAF, which proves every bit as adept
as the Swedish and Norwegian ones in Sousa’s music – and every bit as attuned
to these works as any American band would be. There are several world première recordings here that show Sousa
to be as clever and tuneful in his less-known works as in his better-known
ones: the overture to an 1879 operetta called Katherine; an excerpt called Mama
and Papa from Sousa’s 1899 retelling of the Aladdin story, Chris and the Wonderful Lamp; waltzes
known as Paroles D’Amour from 1880;
and two works from 1923: a humoresque for a comedy duo called Gallagher and Shean and a pastiche of
popular and march tunes called When Navy
Ships Are Coaling. Every one of these heretofore unrecorded works is
reflective of Sousa’s creativity and essentially bright outlook on music and on
life – but not all the pieces here are light. President Garfield’s Inaugural March and President Garfield’s Funeral March “In Memoriam” both date to 1881,
when Garfield was assassinated four months after his inauguration, and while
the first of these works is suitably grand and lyrical, the second is a moving
dirge that shows how deeply Garfield’s death must have affected the composer. This
13th Sousa volume also offers four early marches that have been
recorded from time to time but are scarcely common fare: Occidental March (1887), Mother
Goose March (1883), Resumption March
(1879) and White Plume March (1884).
Also here is the late Camera
Studies—Suite, a three-movement work from 1920 that includes a Spanish
dance, a lyrical interlude and a bright and happy conclusion in the positive
mode that listeners generally associate with Sousa, even though this top-notch
series has shown him to be anything but a one-dimensional composer.

Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996) was a
substantial composer as well, writing at more length and with greater depth
than Sousa did and justifying his reputation as the third great Soviet-era
composer, after Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Naxos has not officially announced
a Weinberg series, but it has been releasing a few of his 19 numbered
symphonies along with a selection of his other orchestral music, with CDs
including the Sixth and Nineteenth conducted by Vladimir Lande and one
containing the Eighth conducted by Antoni Wit. A new Naxos disc is the third
featuring Lande, and this time the symphony is especially significant, having
been written in 1976 in memory of Shostakovich, who was a major supporter of
Weinberg’s music and his close friend for three decades, and who died in August
1975. This hour-long work is not only massive but also very close structurally
to many of Shostakovich’s symphonies, and the elements of its tribute to the
older composer are many and varied – and subtle enough so they will not all be
obvious to listeners. There are, for example, various uses of the D-S-C-H
monogram that Shostakovich incorporated into many of his works, and there are
many touches of themes and orchestration that are drawn from Shostakovich’s
works and draw upon them structurally if not in any overt imitative sense. Weinberg’s
Symphony No. 12 is recognizably “Shostakovich-ian” without being a forthright
tribute: it is a highly worthy work in its own right as well as a heartfelt
memorial to a major influence on Weinberg’s music. Lande conducts it feelingly
and with fine attention to detail – and its seriousness is well balanced by the
fourth of four suites drawn from Weinberg’s The
Golden Key, one of the composer’s two surviving ballets. A satirical work
in the tradition of commedia dell’arte,
but with many distinctly Russian elements and music that often recalls the
theatrical productions of both Shostakovich and Prokofiev, this is a lively and
amusing work that, on the basis of its fourth suite, is filled with character
pieces that flit by quickly while evoking amusement, lyricism, rustic dances,
humor and geniality. The light ballet suite makes a fine complement to
Weinberg’s weighty Twelfth Symphony while confirming, as has each of these
Naxos releases, that Weinberg is worthy of high regard among 20th-century
composers.

Two other new series
entries, from Naxos and Steinway & Sons respectively, offer music that is
much less consequential. They therefore get (+++) ratings, even though the
works are performed with consummate skill. The fourth and last CD in Naxos’
series of violin-and-piano music by Pablo Sarasate is entirely devoted to encore-style
salon music transcribed or arranged by Sarasate for his own use in concert
performances. There is a substantial piece here in Sarasate’s early Souvenirs de Faust (on themes from Gounod’s
opera), and there are five Chopin arrangements (Waltzes 3, 4 and 8 and
Nocturnes 2 and 8) that are very much worth hearing in the composer-violinist’s
arrangements. But the rest of the music on this CD is rather thin gruel. One
piece, Joachim Raff’s La fée
d’amour, has considerable historical interest, since it was Sarasate’s own
favorite concert piece – and it is the longest work on the CD. It is pleasant
music and highly virtuosic, but without the Sarasate connection has little to
offer on a strictly musical basis. Also here are Sarasate’s version of the famous
Largo from Handel’s Xerxes and of the
Air from Bach’s D Major Suite (BWV 1068) – plus a number of pleasant handlings
of pleasant-enough music by less-known to nearly unknown composers, including Guitarra by Moritz Moszkowski
(1854-1925), the Allegro from Sonata No. 1by Jean-Pierre Guignon (1702-1775), “La Chasse” from Sonata No. 5 by
Jean-Joseph de Mondonville (1711-1772), the Sarabande and Tambourin from the
Violin Sonata, Op. 9, No. 3, by Jean-Marie Leclair (1697-1764), and the Allegro
from Sonata No. 9 by Jean-Baptiste Senaillé (1687-1730). Sarasate had no particular affinity with Baroque
music and made no attempt to focus on its style – his whole approach involved
making the simple more complex so as to showcase his own very considerable
violinistic abilities, and all these arrangements and transcriptions fill the
bill nicely for a concert virtuoso of the 19th and early 20th
centuries. Tianwa Yang scales the summits of the works’ requirements highly
effectively, and Markus Hadulla provides exemplary support while remaining
firmly in the background, as any accompanist of Sarasate would have been
expected to do. This is a fine and highly listenable CD, but lacking in real
musical substance: had Sarasate not been shown to be a skilled composer through
works on the other discs in this series, he would come across through this one
as a very accomplished dilettante.

Argentine pianist Mirian
Conti also brings very considerable skill to engaging but less-than-profound
music in her second release of piano music from her homeland on the Steinway
& Sons label. The 10 composers whose brief works – some of them very brief
indeed – appear on this disc are almost wholly unknown, although Conti argues strongly
in her booklet notes that they deserve more than obscurity. The music itself
makes a weaker case than the words do, though: Remo Pignoni, Enrique Albano,
Anibal Troilo, Carlos Guastavino, Mario Broeders, Cayetano Troiani, Angel
Lasala, Julián Aguirre, Horacio
Salgán, and Mariano Mores tend
to blend together in these pieces into creators of well-constructed, rhythmic,
folk-music-based piano pieces, many of them taking off from traditional
Argentinian dances. There is expressiveness here but little subtlety. To cite
one example among many, a listener would expect Troilo’s Milonguero triste to sound sad, simply on the basis of the second
word in its title, and so indeed it does, in entirely unsurprising ways. The
six very short pieces by Pignoni – four of them last less than a minute apiece
and the other two not much longer – are highly enjoyable vignettes; the overtly
nationalistic and more-extended Impresiones
de Mi Tierra by Lasala and Aires
Nacionales Argentinos—5 Tristes by Aguirre are somewhat more substantive;
Guastavino’s Sonatina for Piano shows
a firm grasp of classical form; and so on. All the music here is easy to hear
and nicely constructed, and the use of Argentinian melodies provides a
pleasantly exotic flavor to many of the pieces. But there is little distinctive
among the composers, at least in these brief works – a fact that the excellence
of Conti’s playing does nothing to conceal.

It is hard to decide whether
to set off celebratory fireworks or to pound one’s head against the wall in
frustration at this re-release of recordings of five Strauss operettas. On the
one hand, the set brings together four good-to-outstanding analog recordings: Die Fledermaus from 1972, Eine Nacht in Venedig from 1967, Der Zigeunerbaron from 1969, and Wiener Blut from 1976, and packages them
with a digital recording – indeed, the world première recording – of Simplicius
from 1999. The sound ranges from very good to exemplary, and the singing is
idiomatic and features some of the best operetta performers of recent times:
the ubiquitous and ever-smooth Nicolai Gedda, Anneliese Rothenberger, Renate
Holm, Hermann Prey, Piotr Beczala, and even Grace Bumbry. And the pricing of
the set is simply wonderful.

On the other hand, the whole
box smacks of a bargain-basement approach to music that deserves much, much
better. Even the old EMI boxed re-releases were handled with more care than
this: for instance, a seven-operetta Lehár
collection listed all the tracks on every CD in the enclosed booklet and
presented scene-by-scene summations of the works. Not so this Warner release.
Librettos for the operettas may be too much to hope for – although links to
places where they could be found online would have been a huge help to listeners,
especially when it comes to such a rarity as Simplicius – but here listeners never even find out what the works
are about, each operetta being reduced to a single-paragraph summation that is
completely inadequate and disappointing in the extreme. Truncated track lists
appear only on the backs of the cardboard CD sleeves (each of which,
ironically, says “see booklet for details,” although no such details are
given). And those track listings are riddled with errors and sloppiness that
ought to embarrass a world-class music company. For example, all eight
references to numbers sung by soldiers in Simplicius
misspell the word as “soliders,” and the word “prisoners” is misspelled
“prisonsers” as a bonus. This is beyond sloppy: it is insulting to the music
and those interested in it.

Yet there is so much to be
interested in that it is difficult to stay angry for long at the disappointingly
poor packaging of this set. Willi Boskovsky was one of the great Strauss
interpreters, and was in his prime when he recorded this Die Fledermaus and Wiener
Blut. The works zip along smartly, the tempos are judiciously chosen, the
singing is uniformly of high quality, and the music – which, after all, is the
point here – is just wonderful. It is worth remembering that Strauss got into
theater not for any grandiose reasons but because he was looking for a steady
source of income that would not require him, personally, to be present constantly
as violinist/conductor. This helps explain why the librettos of his operettas
were so often execrable, in contrast to the marvelous tunes with which he
bedecked the insipid and often-confusing words. Of course, English speakers
will have no luck following the operettas’ dialogue, which is frequently
extensive and is crucial to the stage experience: the spoken parts tend to
advance the action, while the musical ones comment on it. But, again, it is the
music that provides the joy here, and there is much joy to be had. Indeed,
there is somewhat more enjoyment than the operetta titles themselves indicate,
since several of these particular performances include interpolations from
other Strauss operettas. This Die
Fledermaus, for example, omits the Act II ballet or any of the various
substitutes for it usually offered, but gives Falke an aria from Waldmeister, while this Eine Nacht in Venedig includes so many
interpolations, mostly from Ralph Benatzky's Strauss-based 1928 Casanova, that it
is practically a pastiche. Wiener Blut,
of course, is a pastiche, assembled
at the end of Strauss’ life from music by him and his brother, Josef, and first
performed some five months after Johann’s death.

The performances led by
Franz Allers do not have quite the sparkle of those conducted by Boskovsky, but
Allers too has a fine sense of pacing and balance, and this Eine Nacht in Venedig and Der Zigeunerbaron are wonderfully tuneful trifles packed with delightful numbers. As for
Simplicius, it is a work that sounds
far more familiar than its extreme rarity on stage would indicate, since
Strauss used its music in a number of other works that are played considerably
more frequently. It is an unusually serious operetta with an
even-more-than-usually complicated plot and much of the flavor of a stage play
with musical elements included from time to time: numerous scenes contain no
music at all and are omitted from the recording. Franz Welser-Möst does not have the sort of easy
comfort with this music that Boskovsky and Allers possessed, but his
performance is creditable, well-paced and sung adequately, even though the
soloists here are not in the same league as the excellent ones in the other
operettas. Having Simplicius
available at all is a joy for Strauss fans, and having it available in what is
overall a very fine performance is a bonus. Add in the wonders of the older
analog recordings and you have here a set that will bring great musical pleasure
for a great many years – even as it keeps reminding you, through its
frustrating imperfections, of how much better it could have been.

Reissues, updates and
repackagings are an inevitability of publishing for books aimed at young
readers, inviting reconsideration of books that made quite a splash in the past
or providing a chance to read companion volumes for ones that proved popular.
Or, once in a while, a revival is of a genuinely interesting book, such as The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes,
a soupily sentimental and somewhat dated but nevertheless charming work by
DuBose Heyward, who is far better known for Porgy
(1925) – which became a play in 1927 and formed the basis for Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 1935 – than for this
little child-oriented work from 1939. Originally a story told by Heyward to his
daughter, Jenifer, The Country Bunny and
the Little Gold Shoes was written down after family friend Marjorie Flack
suggested Heyward do so; and Flack then provided lovely, gentle illustrations
that prettily complement the attractive period tale. The careful republication of
this little Easter-time story is a small joy: the tale is about a country
rabbit who longs to become one of the world’s five Easter bunnies, succeeds
because she has done such a wonderful job bringing up her 21 baby bunnies, and
is given magical gold shoes to help her complete an especially difficult
Easter-egg-delivery task. Heyward – whose first name, oddly, is incorrectly
spelled as two words in this new edition – was very much a man of his time in writing
this story, which for that reason will not appeal to thoroughly modern families
in which single mothers face down adversity daily and train their children in
skills that go far beyond housekeeping. So The
Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes is a period piece, but it is a
heartfelt one that will bring much enjoyment to kids and parents willing to
step back a few decades in time and experience some story elements that are
timeless.

Speaking of stepping back in
time, that is just what Annie Jaffin does in Laurel Snyder’s Seven Stories Up, a companion to Bigger Than a Bread Box that shares with
the earlier book a mixture of magic and rather overly earnest family-connection
storytelling. It is not necessary to have read the earlier book to understand Seven Stories Up, but it does help,
since the context within which Annie’s new adventure occurs is established in
the prior book – in which the discovery of a magical bread box (which delivers
whatever you wish for, provided that it fits inside) leads to difficult
coming-of-age questions. Similar questions, for a similar narrative purpose,
pervade Seven Stories Up, in which
Annie meets her dying grandmother in 1987 and is then magically transported 50
years back in time to meet Molly, the girl who would become her rather
embittered grandmother, when Molly herself is a child. The two girls form a
friendship over which hang Annie’s concerns about whether what she does in the
past will change her own future. Seven
Stories Up is filled with events intended to reflect meaningful elements of
growing up. For example, Molly is at first an invalid living on the top floor
of a Baltimore hotel, but Annie entices her downstairs and then farther and
farther afield, through the streets of the city – and it is as their
explorations carry them to greater and greater distances from the safety of
Molly’s hotel room that matters become complicated and Annie realizes how much
of her own future she may be risking. In other words, going farther and farther
from your comfort zone is a recipe for new experiences and coming of age, but
also carries real risks of leaving childhood behind – and real rewards as well.
This sort of structure is typical in Snyder’s books and most definitely
pervades Bigger Than a Bread Box.
Fans of that book and of the family-focused warmth of Snyder’s novels will
enjoy Seven Stories Up, although in
truth many of its plot points – including its conclusion – are scarcely
unexpected.

Jarrett J. Krosoczka has
specialized in the unexpected in his series of Lunch Lady graphic novels, but Lunch Lady and the Schoolwide Scuffle is
full of strictly expected material –
expected, that is, by readers of the previous nine books, who will be the only
ones likely to enjoy this 10th series entry. The problem here is
that Lunch Lady and Betty have been unceremoniously laid off by the new school
superintendent (readers will need to be familiar with the ninth book, Lunch Lady and the Video Game Villain,
for this to make sense), and now evildoers from all the earlier books in the
series have returned to take over the school and help bring an even-more-ridiculous-than-usual
evil plot to fruition. There are so many characters here that Krosoczka can
give very little time to any of them, and readers not already familiar with the
bad guys – or the good ones, for that matter – will quickly find themselves confused
by who is doing what to whom, why and how. Even the
kitchen-implements-as-weapons elements of the book get short shrift and are
less interesting than usual. As a series summation, Lunch Lady and the Schoolwide Scuffle will satisfy readers who have
followed all the earlier adventures, but as a standalone book – much less one
in which someone might first encounter Lunch Lady, Betty and the three-kid Breakfast
Bunch – the book unfortunately falls well short of several of the earlier ones.

Bud, Not Buddy was never intended as part of a series, but like
Snyder’s Bigger Than a Bread Box,
Christopher Paul Curtis’ novel spawned a companion book, The Mighty Miss Malone, and both novels (the first from 1999, the
second from 2012) are now available in new paperback editions. These are books
set in the same time frame as Seven
Stories Up – the Depression years – but the focus is very different, in
large part because Snyder’s characters are white and Curtis’ are
African-American. Both Bud, Not Buddy
and The Mighty Miss Malone take place
in the industrial heartland of the 1930s – the former in Flint, Michigan, the
latter in Gary, Indiana and then in Illinois. Both novels are fairly
conventionally plotted coming-of-age tales – the former focusing on motherless
10-year-old runaway Bud, the latter on 12-year-old Deza Malone. Both books have
a strong family orientation: Bud is seeking the father he has never known, and
Deza is trying to help her mother maintain some semblance of family togetherness
after her father leaves Indiana in search of work and her brother becomes a
singer in the Chicago area. The trials and tribulations of the young
protagonists are nothing special, but the local color of the places they visit
and the period history found in both books make the novels interesting, while
Curtis’ well-paced narratives keep young readers involved. The new paperback
versions, presumably aimed at bringing the books to readers who do not already
know them, will be attractive to families who find that these stories have resonance
for them and who respond well to tales of a time when economic circumstances in
the United States were far more dire than in recent years – putting children
and adults alike under even greater pressures than those they have recently
been facing.

PopCap has a big hit with
the thoroughly ridiculous video game Plants
vs. Zombies, and it is scarcely surprising that spinoffs in the
non-video-game world have been, um, growing rapidly. Never mind that the
spinoffs, like the game itself, seem already to have eaten the brains of
participants – the whole Plants vs.
Zombies ethos is designed to be mindless fun. Even on the printed page, in
two new Plants vs. Zombies activity
books, the whole idea is to have as much fun as possible while doing so little
thinking that it seems as if zombies really have eaten your brains. Thus, Plant Your Path Junior Novel does not
require readers to follow a plot from start to finish – nothing that
complicated! This is one of those choose-your-own storybooks, in which you read a snippet of
narrative, then pick which of two choices you would like to follow, then go to
whatever page that choice leads to. The story itself is just like other Plants vs. Zombies tales – there is, in
fact, only one story in this whole world, which involves running away from
zombies and using plants to fight them. Sample narrative: “Poof! Poof! Poof! The little Puffshrooms pummel the zombies with
poisonous fumes. Magnetshrooms tear the helmets off Football Zombies and rip
the screens from the bony hands of Screen Door Zombies. Hypno-shrooms turn the
zombies on each other.” And so on – and on and on and on, but only in little
bits before another fork in the road, or fork in the story, has readers
deciding which way to go next. There are a couple of endings in which the
zombies eat readers’ brains and a couple in which they do not, but the story is
sufficiently brainless either way to be amusing for fans of the video game on
which it is based.

As for Brain Food, it doesn’t really require much thinking, which sort of makes
sense. From coloring Crazy Dave to answering trivia questions to drawing
anti-zombie plants to counting zombies to unscrambling words to filling in the
blanks of a story to finding the differences between two zombies, the book is
filled with simple, non-brain-intensive games and puzzles that won’t really
feed readers’ brains but at least won’t eat them. There are secret messages to
decode, puzzles to solve, pictures to finish, dots to connect, mazes to work
through, even some tic-tac-toe games to play. But most of the fun here comes
from giving fans chances to see the characters they enjoy from the whole Plants vs. Zombies world: Zombot, Dr.
Zomboss, Gargantuar and Imp, Jack-in-the-Box Zombie, Newspaper Zombie,
Buckethead Zombie, Pogo Zombie and others. In fact, one recurring activity here
involves looking at silhouettes of zombies and guessing which ones are which.
There is nothing particularly difficult in this book and nothing particularly
outlandish except for the underlying premise itself. As a way for Plants vs. Zombies fans to pass the time
when they are not immersed in their video-game universe, Brain Food is silly fun that – who knows? – may even make fans’
brains more spicily attractive to zombies!Oops…hmm…could that be the insidious point of the whole thing?

The latest hard-boiled
reluctant woman detective to appear in a mystery thriller is one of the best.
Pirio Kasparov, protagonist of Elisabeth Elo’s debut novel, North of Boston, is a very familiar type
nowadays – the dedicated, violence-prone male detective of decades past, the
likes of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe,
having largely disappeared. Nowadays the descendants of Nancy Drew are as
strong, intense and determined as any hard-boiled male, and often have a great
deal more personality – as Pirio does.

Like so many other fictional
investigators, Pirio is a reluctant one, spurred on by personal circumstances –
several sets of them, in her case. The book opens after she has surprisingly
survived four hours in ice-cold water after the boat on which she and her
friend Ned had been setting lobster traps is rammed and sunk by a huge
freighter. Ned is gone and presumed drowned (frequent thriller readers will
wonder if he is really dead); he
leaves behind a son, Noah, and the boy’s mother, Pirio’s longtime friend,
Thomasina. In addition to guilt and uncertainty about the accident – if it was
an accident, which Pirio increasingly comes to doubt – Pirio is pulled into the
usual web of dark doings because of the perfume company founded by her father
and (now dead) mother, because perfumes used to use a whale byproduct called
ambergris as a fixative, and ambergris, Pirio comes to realize, has a lot to do
with what has been going on north of Boston.

The time frame for the book
is a bit unclear and is a weakness of what is otherwise a very strong
narrative. There is no doubt that the book is set in 2013: Pirio specifically states that certain key evidence has not been updated for three years, since 2010. But ambergris is no longer a factor in the perfume business – synthetics
are used nowadays, ambergris being difficult to find and uncertain of supply.
Also, it becomes clear early in the book that Pirio uses an answering machine, and this later becomes a plot point -- and
confusingly pushes the novel’s time frame back a few years. In other
respects, though, North of Boston stays
up to date: Pirio, who is 30, narrates the book and certainly
sounds contemporary. Indeed, her distinctive voice is the main quality that
separates this book from other thriller/mysteries with strong female central
characters. Pirio’s personality and concerns are modern but, within that
context, thoroughly ordinary: uncertainties about love and sex, rebelliousness
without any particular cause, difficulties with her strong-willed father and
her stepmother, cynicism and recklessness tightly bound together, and so forth.
Pirio really isn’t a Sam Spade, although her father, Milosa, pointedly says
that she ought to be exactly that. But she is tenacious, determined, observant
when she puts her mind to it (something she does not always do: she can be a
bit lazy), and true to herself – a necessity for someone who is the moral
center of an amoral universe, which is the usual role of the central character
in books like North of Boston.

Although entirely a genre
novel, Elo’s is not merely a genre
book, thanks to its compelling protagonist. Readers get quickly pulled into
Pirio’s life and concerns – the first-person narrative is quite well done – and
as a result have an emotional investment in the story that is often missing in
thrillers that appeal more to one’s intellect and craving for excitement than to
one’s heart. Pirio has the usual interactions with subsidiary characters: a
journalist who helps her seek the truth, ex-lovers, and so forth – and these
people are not nearly as well-formed as Pirio herself, although her father does
have depth beyond that of an autocratic Russian businessman. Actually, what
takes on the most life in North of
Boston, aside from Pirio herself, are the places where the story plays out,
especially the frigid northern environs that Elo presents with a sure hand for
atmospheric description. There are interesting similarities between Pirio in North of Boston and Edie Kiglatuk,
protagonist of White Heat and The Boy in the Snow by M.J. McGrath, and
other parallels with the Cassie Maddox books by Tana French: McGrath and French
also rely on detailed scene-setting and characterization as much as overt
action and traditional elements of mysteries, thrillers and detective stories.
Elo is a less polished writer than French, but not much less of one than
McGrath, and Elo’s followup to North of
Boston – which is already in the works – is likely to show the author
developing her style and her characterization abilities even further. North of Boston itself is an impressive
debut that never pushes beyond the boundaries of its genre but that makes the
genre itself seem sufficiently intriguing so that readers will want to read
more of Elo’s entries in it, especially insofar as they remain focused on the
harsh but well-modulated voice of Pirio Kasparov.

The pleasures and
frustrations of José
Serebrier’s Dvořák cycle for
Warner Classics are yet again in evidence in its fourth volume – but,
thankfully, the pleasures in this case far outnumber the irritations. The entire
sequence in which Serebrier’s performances are appearing is decidedly odd: the
first release focused on Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” and also
included the Czech Suite and two of
the Slavonic Dances; the second
offered Symphony No. 7 with another of the dances, the Scherzo Capriccioso and the entirely out-of-context tone poem, In Nature’s Realm (which is the first part
of a trilogy and would much better have been offered that way); the third
presented Symphonies Nos. 3 and 6. This hop-skip-and-jump handling of Dvořák’s symphonies was made more confusing by
Serebrier’s way with the works themselves: he has repeatedly changed tempos for
attempted emotional effects, indulging in the sort of unwarranted rubato that today’s best conductors have
long since forsworn. And this is very curious, since Serebrier is not only a
knowledgeable conductor but also a composer of some skill himself – he would
surely not put up with other conductors treating his works as he has been
treating Dvořák’s. It is
perhaps inevitable, under the circumstances, to approach the fourth release in
this series with a certain amount of trepidation, but the good news is that
here Serebrier has not only gotten control of his more extreme
change-what-the-composer-wants impulses but has also delved quite deeply into
the structure and mood of a symphony that he refers to, in his booklet notes,
as a masterpiece. Indeed, this may be the first time that a conductor has
awarded that accolade to Dvořák’s
Second, but Serebrier’s sensitive performance, so attentive to the nuances of
the score, makes a strong argument for the appellation.

Symphony No. 2 is the earliest of the nine
that was played during the composer’s lifetime – he never heard No. 1, “The
Bells of Zlonice.” The Second is a big work in every sense, treating the
orchestra with a sure-handedness beyond Dvořák’s 24 years at the time of its composition, overflowing with melodies
and emotions of considerable maturity and managing to have a somewhat Brahmsian
flavor without ever actually sounding like the older composer’s music (in
contrast with Dvořák’s Symphony
No. 6, which for all its originality is in parts almost imitative). All four
movements of Dvořák’s Second
are constructed on a large scale, and all four employ lower strings and darker
orchestral colors to fine effect. Under Serebrier, and with the Bournemouth Symphony
Orchestra playing with a more-burnished tone than is its wont, the symphony
breathes deeply, sighs feelingly and eventually emerges in a sort of equivocal
triumph. The second movement, lovely as it is, tends to meander a bit, and Serebrier
does interfere with its smooth flow to some extent – but the rubato is mild enough not to distract
listeners from the heartfelt nature of the overall interpretation. The finale,
which never quite lives up to the promise of its very unusual first few
measures, gets a bit too much of the “Serebrier treatment” that the other
symphonies in this series have received: unwilling to let the music speak for
itself, Serebrier tries to boost its emotive potential through tempo changes
that succeed only in restricting the smooth and lovely flow at which Dvořák, even at age 24, was adept. Still, this
is on balance a lovingly expansive reading of a symphony that has never
deserved its near-total neglect – indeed, this is the best release so far in
Serebrier’s Dvořák sequence. The
three Slavonic Dances are nice filler
items. In one of them (Op. 46, No. 3) Serebrier again insists on puttinga bit more into the music than Dvořák did, but as a whole, these are pleasant,
well-paced, upbeat readings with fine sectional balance, and all the dances are
played with enthusiasm.

Dvořák was never the master of orchestration that Berlioz was – very few
composers have approached the Berlioz level – but listeners who know Berlioz
mainly through the drama of Symphonie
Fantastique, Les Troyens and the concert and opera overtures may be far
less aware of the subtleties of orchestral writing that give the composer’s
music much of its unique sound. Those subtle touches are fully in evidence in
the new recording of L'enfance du
Christ conducted by Robin Ticciati, who has already proved his
understanding of the composer in Linn Records SACDs of Symphonie Fantastique, Les nuits d'été and La mort de Cléopâtre. A dramatic oratorio with elements of opera,
especially in the first of its three parts, L'enfance
du Christ is quieter, gentler and more reverent than Berlioz’ more-familiar
works. Perhaps its most accessible elements are the scene in Part I between
Herod and the soothsayers, and the well-known L’adieu des bergers (“Shepherds’ Farewell”) in Part II. The
peculiar sonorities at the very opening of the music clearly show Berlioz’ expertise
in orchestration, and the composer’s use of a rather old-fashioned style
through much of the overall work shows how elegantly and eloquently he could
express himself without needing the sort of forward-looking effects that
pervade Symphonie Fantastique.
The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra plays this music very well indeed,
although the strings’ use of considerable vibrato is at odds with Ticciati’s
usual concern for historically correct (nearly non-vibrato) performances of
Berlioz, which is what the Scottish Chamber Orchestra delivered in Ticciati’s
prior Linn recordings. Still, the Swedish ensemble’s approach provides a
comfortable lushness that listeners will find quite attractive, with particular
warmth in L’adieu des bergers
– a scene in which the Swedish Radio Symphony Choir also excels. The four soloists are all very fine
indeed. Alastair Miles impressively handles both the nervous tension of Herod
in Part I and the highly sympathetic portrayal of the Father of the Family in
Part III. Véronique Gens and Stephan Loges, as Mary and Joseph, blend well
together and sing feelingly. And as the narrator, Yann Beuron provides the
context of the work with skill and expressiveness. L'enfance du Christ is not one of Berlioz’ most immediately
attractive pieces and not one of his most carefully worked through: he
assembled it over a number of years before eventually presenting it in final form in
1854. Yet the gentle lyricism of this work, when managed with the skill that
Ticciati brings to this performance, is winning, and gives the music
considerable staying power – abetted by Berlioz’ very high sensitivity to the
expressive potential of all the sections of the orchestra, both individually
and in combination.

Julian Anderson (born 1967) also
has a good deal of skill in developing works for orchestra, but he has
marshalled that skill in different ways over time – as a new London
Philharmonic Orchestra recording on the orchestra’s own label makes clear.
Anderson, the London Philharmonic’s resident composer since 2010, was strongly
influenced in his early career by spectralism, one of those self-consciously
modern compositional approaches created more to showcase the cleverness of
those using it than to try to connect with those listening to it. Spectralism,
which uses computerized analyses of sound spectra as a compositional tool, is a
significant element in the earliest work on this CD, The Crazed Moon (1997). This is a dense and complex work whose
effectiveness is insufficient to justify the effort required of listeners to
decipher it – although Vladimir Jurowski certainly leads it as if he fully understands its ins and outs
and is doing his best to communicate them. Ryan Wigglesworth is equally adept
in leading the most-recent work on the CD, The
Discovery of Heaven, which was recorded at its world première performance in 2012. This is a
work of considerably greater clarity than The
Crazed Moon, being just as full of ideas and just as energetic, but a great
deal easier to follow and more immediately engaging, even if it is unlikely to
be immediately appealing to many
listeners. The Discovery of Heaven is
more effective as an intellectual exercise than an emotional plunge. It is the third
work here, written between the others, that is the most gripping and involving.
Fantasias (2007-09) is an extended
concerto for orchestra, requiring tremendous deftness of playing, which the LPO
delivers, and considerable sensitivity in conducting, which Jurowski provides.
This is a work that keeps the audience guessing, its changes of rhythm, tempo
and structure so frequent and abrupt that the experience of listening to it is
a bit like riding a roller coaster while sitting on a see-saw. Exhilarating and
vivid, filled with modern compositional techniques and a very deft use of the orchestra,
it is nevertheless a very approachable work – and one that well repays repeated
hearings. As a whole, this is a (+++) CD, but Fantasias, which here receives its world première recording, is a top-notch
offering from both the composer and the performers.

January 16, 2014

Scholastic “Discover More”:
Titanic—A Picture History of the Shipwreck That Shocked the World. By Sean
Callery. Scholastic. $15.99.

Winter Sky. By Patricia
Reilly Giff. Wendy Lamb Books. $15.99.

The sheer scale of the
disaster of the sinking of the Titanic,
along with the sheer scale of the ship itself, keeps the 101-years-ago disaster
fresh in many people’s minds and makes it worthy of a top-notch entry in
Scholastic’s “Discover More” series. Details about turn-of-the-20th-century
shipbuilding, of competition between the White Star and Cunard lines, of
customs such as promenading, of the designer of the Titanic (who was aboard on the maiden voyage and one of the
victims), of cabin layout and design, of children’s deck games aboard the
doomed ship – these and much more appear in Sean Callery’s well-designed
retelling, which is crammed with eyewitness and passenger accounts and many,
many photos, some in black and white and some colorized. Like all the “Discover
More” books, this is an oversize paperback designed to be looked at as much as
read – the text is short and tied closely to the photos, but is nevertheless
packed with facts and interesting information. There is, for instance, a photo
of a countess who steered a lifeboat all night long after the ship’s sinking –
while other survivors let crew members do all the work. There is information on
the final meals served aboard the ship, the differences in service among the
three passenger classes, and the fact that of the 1,517 people who died, 685
were crew members – many of whom helped rescue passengers or stayed aboard the
ship to try to stop the water from pouring in. Big stories like this one are
difficult to tell without personalizing them by making them into multiple small
stories, and Callery does this very well indeed, making this oft-told tale seem
fresh and every bit as tragic as it ever has.A free digital book, available to buyers of the print version, gets into
more detail about what happened by presenting the stories of five survivors of
the ship’s sinking. But even without seeing that book, readers of this
“Discover More” volume will find out a great deal about Titanic, what happened to the ship and the people aboard it, and
why the story remains such a compelling one after so many years.

The Titanic story is a century-old wintertime one on a large scale –
and winter continues to provide an effective backdrop for modern stories as
well. Winter Sky is fiction, is
decidedly small-scale, and ends without great tragedy or, indeed, any loss of
life. But it is an affecting story nevertheless, told with Patricia Reilly
Giff’s usual sensitivity to family matters and skill at characterization. It is
the tale of a girl called Siria, named for the brightest star in the winter sky,
who loves the stars that make her think of her now-gone mother – and who tries
to bring luck to her firefighter father by sneaking out of her house at night
to chase the trucks heading to blazes. Abetted by her best friend, Douglas,
Siria continues her adventures until she discovers that someone appears to be setting fires – putting her dad and the
other firefighters in jeopardy. And to make matters worse, the clues she
discovers make Siria think Douglas may be the arsonist. Complicating matters
further is Siria’s rescue of a dog that has become stuck in a pipe, a dog she
cannot possibly keep but that seems to know something about the fire-setting
situation, so she cannot possibly take it to a shelter. Matters get more and
more complicated as the mystery of the fires deepens and as Siria copes with
her father being hospitalized after being injured on the job. In fact, the
story gets somewhat too complicated as Giff has Siria juggle a few more issues
and difficulties than the rather frail plot can withstand. Winter Sky is never quite sure whether it is mainly a family story,
a mystery, a girl-and-animal story, or a coming-of-age tale, and is not really
solid enough to succeed as a mixture of all those elements. It is nevertheless
a very affectingly written (+++) book that has a not-very-surprising solution
to the fire mystery and a feel-good ending that leaves everyone in the story
happier and more satisfied than they have been. Fans of Giff’s books will be
happy and satisfied, too.

Titles tend to overstate. The new book by C. Thomas Vangsness, Jr., and Greg Ptacek will not
really show readers how to overcome
arthritis, which is an incurable disease – although it will show how to manage the condition to prevent it from ruling
your everyday life. The book by Sara Latta will scarcely explain everything about 50 phobias, not all of
which are in fact famous, but it will
provide an interesting, if superficial, look at some things that some people
fear well beyond all reason – and explain why this may be so, and what phobics
may be able to do to cope better.

Title aside, the
Vangsness/Ptacek book is both a clearly written discussion of what arthritis is
and how to cope with it, and a surprisingly entertaining work about a disease
that is anything but fun to experience. For example, Vangsness – professor of
orthopedic surgery and chief of sports medicine at the University of Southern
California’s Keck School of Medicine – interestingly explains the possible
connection between a Time magazine
cover story in 2004 and the “welcome but unintended consequences” of
discovering that the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug Celebrex appeared to
reduce people’s risk of developing intestinal polyps. This in turn led to a new
focus on inflammation as a core cause of many bodily ailments – a focus that
continues to drive a considerable amount of research today. And this is
directly relevant to arthritis, since the notion that inflammation could
“actually cause the loss of cartilage that is the main symptom of
osteoarthritis” flew in the face of the long-accepted medical belief that
arthritis occurred because the body’s cartilage simply wore down with age. Vangsness
and Ptacek present this sort of research-oriented diagnostic information with
surprisingly amusing chapter subheads: “Of Mice and Meniscus,” “Keeping Your
Gait Straight.” And they note that although “more Americans are now at an age
when they are likely to suffer from osteoarthritis,” they also comment that
this “doesn’t explain the spike in reports of lack of mobility among arthritis
sufferers.” This in turn leads to a chapter whose title, enclosed by the
authors in quotation marks, is “Obeseritis,” where they explain that “obesity
and arthritis have become so intertwined that it warrants a whole new term to
describe this phenomenon.” This book is not designed to scold people into
better eating habits, though: it offers “seven proven principles” for dietary
improvement and weight loss, but does so nonjudgmentally, and also has a brief
explanation of the psychology that may underlie the tendency to overeat. And
this is just part of the narrative here: arthritis drugs and supplements,
surgery and alternative therapies, stem-cell research and other topics are
covered with plain-spokenness, in a style that is surprisingly breezy in a
medical book – even one written for popular consumption. There are patient case
studies here, showing different forms of arthritis (there are more than 100 in
all, with the most common, osteoarthritis, affecting one-sixth of American
adults and being the nation’s leading cause of disability) and different
approaches to treatment; a discussion of the importance of getting the right
diagnosis (which may seem an obvious need, but which is complicated when it
comes to arthritic ailments); a look at post-surgical sex life; an interesting
historical discussion of the original “snake oil,” in the context of the
placebo effect leading to improved symptoms in many people; a look at the use
of chiropractors, hypnosis, biofeedback and other techniques; and a great deal
more. The book’s style prevents this wealth of information from turning into an
indigestible lump – and some parts of the book, such as Vangsness’ comments on
“my unlikely stem cell journey,” will be intriguing even for people who are not
arthritis sufferers. In all, The New
Science of Overcoming Arthritis is a first-rate roundup of current thinking
about the disease (more properly, “diseases”), about treatment and about where
research in the field is going now. Not all that is here is really new, and
“coping with” arthritis is more the book’s focus than “overcoming” it, but the
book itself has so much of value in it that it can easily be forgiven a certain
amount of hyperbole in the title.

There is no significant
medical value in Scared Stiff, but
treatment is not the purpose of this book, even though Latta ends the work with
a few pages about ways in which phobias can be overcome. The idea here is to
provide mildly titillating descriptions of such phobias as astraphobia
(thunderstorms), botanophobia (plants), didaskaleinophobia (school),
gephyrophobia (crossing bridges), and mysophobia (germs). Each short discussion
of a phobia explains where its name comes from (most have Greek roots), what
the phobia entails, and what may cause it (anything from childhood experiences
to genetic predisposition). Many entries list “famous phobics,” such as soccer
star David Beckham for ataxophobia (disorder) and actor Matt Damon for
ophidiophobia (snakes). There are some rather repetitious “Overcoming the Fear”
sections that mostly refer readers to the same few back-of-book pages, and many
sections include “Scare Quotes” that are often neither scary nor particularly
relevant to the phobia just discussed. The most interesting thing about Scared Stiff is its inclusion not only
of well-known phobias such as claustrophobia (confined spaces) and acrophobia (heights)
but also little-known ones such as pogonophobia (beards) and swinophobia
(pigs). Some phobias discussed here have little currency in modern life, such
as wiccaphobia (witches); others are entirely modern, such as nomophobia (fear
of being out of mobile-phone contact, which medical authorities rightfully do
not regard as anything like a classic phobia). Readers interested in fears such
as kakorraphiaphobia (failure) and kinemortophobia (zombies) will get some
basic information on them here, but only that: Latta is determinedly
superficial, even lighthearted, in writing about conditions that in classic
presentation are genuinely debilitating and go well past the ordinarily
frightening. Indeed, Latta’s failure to make it clear just how far beyond the
merely scary a phobia is tends to trivialize these conditions, which can
significantly interfere with sufferers’ daily living and overall quality of
life. Nevertheless, this (+++) book has a good deal that is interesting in it,
simply because the human mind has so many ways to turn against itself – some
with an underlying rational basis, such as pyrophobia (fire) and selachophobia
(sharks), others rooted more in superstition and social awkwardness than
anything else, such as triskaidekaphobia (the number 13) and urophobia
(urination). Expect nothing deep, nothing highly meaningful, but many forays
into unusual thought patterns, and you will find Scared Stiff as enjoyable as it is intended to be – which is far
more enjoyable than the experience of suffering from any true phobia at all.

Mastering the Art of Quitting:
Why It Matters in Life, Love, and Work. By Peg Streep and Alan Bernstein,
L.C.S.W. Da Capo. $24.99.

“Quitters never prosper.”
“Winners never quit, and quitters never win.” Everybody knows that quitting is
a bad thing – it marks you as “not up to the task,” inadequate, a failure,
someone unable to “hang in there” and persist until you actually accomplish
something and get things done. Remember the Little Engine That Could, the
refrain of “I think I can, I think I can,” the persistence that overcame
obstacles? That is the route to success!

Except when it isn’t. “The
ability to quit fully is as valuable a tool to living well as is persistence,”
argue Peg Streep and Alan Bernstein in Mastering
the Art of Quitting. Yes, they say, tenacity matters, but so does
recognition of the fact that not all endeavors succeed: persisting in some
things will lead only to frustration, pulling energy and focus away from
projects that have a greater likelihood of working out. “Quitting is a healthy,
adaptive response when a goal can’t be reached or what appeared to be a life
path turns out to be a blind alley,” say Streep and Bernstein, and in fact persistence
can hold a person back from success – often by engaging such fallacious
thinking as the sunk-cost fallacy, which says that quitting somehow “wastes”
all the energy, money and/or time already invested (all things that, however, are
gone already – throwing “good money after bad,” or good energy for that matter,
will scarcely improve the situation).

Many people are hard-wired,
or at least culturally conditioned, to persist even in the face of multiple
reversals – the authors argue that Americans, in particular, often have a
difficult time quitting. But conditioning can be overcome, they say, offering
yes-or-no statements to allow readers to develop their own “persistence
profile”; another set of statements to show how you set goals and handle
setbacks; and still others to determine “your quitting aptitude.” Stating that
“setting a performance goal isn’t necessarily a good thing,” Streep and
Bernstein suggest goal-setting using a series of organizational categories
(life goals, career goals, relationship goals and learning/achievement goals), then
“using flow to assess your goals.” They provide examples of “goal maps” that
include short-term and long-term goals in each category, then explain how to
quit and, after doing so, how to manage internal fallout such as regret.

There is an element of “the
authors doth protest too much, methinks,” in Mastering the Art of Quitting. The self-tests, self-evaluations and
write-it-down exercises are rather tiresome, appearing as they (or similar
ones) have in so many change-your-life self-help books. And when dealing with
genuinely thorny issues, such as regret over the path not taken, Streep and
Bernstein tend to lapse into unhelpful statements: “Understanding how big a
role avoiding regret plays in your life facilitates artful quitting and helps
elucidate the reasons behind your patterns of persistence.” It is certainly
true that most of us try too hard, some of the time, to attain goals that we
will never reach. It is true that most of us would do better to let certain
matters go and redirect our energy, time and money – all of which are limited –
toward things we can accomplish rather than ones that we cannot. But it is not
always easy to tell the difference – certainly not as easy as Mastering the Art of Quitting suggests.
Streep and Bernstein suggest, early in the book, that we would not admire
Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb as much if he had gotten it right
the first time rather than after thousands of failures. This is likely true: to
many people, overcoming adversity to reach eventual success seems somehow
“better” than having things come “easily.” But the authors do not pursue this
matter: would it have been better for Edison to abandon the light-bulb project,
wholly and without looking back, after, say, a thousand failures? Two thousand?
Knowing when to quit is just as
important as knowing how to quit. And
that when differs not only from
person to person but also from circumstance to circumstance within every
person’s life. Streep and Bernstein are right in asserting that well-managed
quitting is a life skill worth learning, one that can free up our limited internal
and external resources for better use elsewhere. Knowing just how and when to
employ that skill, though, is a significantly more-complex issue than the
authors acknowledge.

The “Solo Edition” releases from
IBA, featuring recent performances by Turkish pianist Idil Biret, have turned
into an ongoing celebration of two of her favorite composers, Liszt and
Schumann. The first three “Solo Edition” releases featured Liszt works, the
second set of three featured Schumann, and now the seventh CD is also devoted
to Schumann. And “devoted” is exactly the right word, because Biret plays this
music with quite exceptional understanding and devotion. Aside from Arabeske (1839), a pleasantly lyrical
rondo that Biret handles with finesse and gentleness, all the works on the new
CD are in multiple sections – giving the pianist plenty of opportunities to highlight
not only harmonic and rhythmic contrasts but also emotional ones, the heart of
Romanticism. The early Papillons
(1831) incorporates still-earlier material in its 12 short sections, which are
nominally program music but which simply come across as nicely contrasted dance
trifles – the whole handled by Biret with suitable delicacy and without
overstating the music’s pleasant but rather constricted emotional palette. There
is more meat to Carnaval (1835), for
all that its subject is overtly lighthearted. The work’s 21 sections include
some that are self-referential (“Florestan” and “Eusebius,” pen names used by
Schumann in his music criticism), some that reflect other musicians (“Chopin”
and “Paganini,” the latter unsurprisingly requiring considerable virtuosity),
and some that bespeak figures from the commedia
dell’arte (“Pierrot,” “Arlequin,” “Pantalon et Colombine”).The work is designated sur quatre notes, the notes representing Schumann himself and the
town of Asch, and it looks ahead to his later relationship with Clara Wieck in
a section called “Chiarina.” The challenge in Carnaval is to give each character piece individuation while
holding the whole work together through recognition of its four-note structural
underpinning. Biret makes the whole of Carnaval
flow naturally and with an apparent simplicity that belies the structural care
with which Schumann assembled it. Carnaval
is fun to hear, as one would expect of a piece whose title refers to the masked
balls at carnival time; but it is far from trivial, and Biret understands this
and makes it clear through her carefully controlled performance. She carefully
manages Waldszenen (1848-49) as well,
giving each of its nine sections its own color and characteristics. Several of
these woodland scenes approach the level of miniature tone poems, notably Verufene Stelle (“Haunted Place”) and
the concluding Abschied (“Farewell”).
Biret is sensitive to the nuances of all the pieces and lets them flow
naturally through their different moods, producing a wholly satisfying,
suitably atmospheric performance that shows yet again just how thoroughly in
tune she is with Schumann’s piano music.

There is considerable
atmosphere as well in Anton Rubinstein’s final symphony, No. 6 (1886) –
especially in its first and second movements, whose drama approaches the
operatic, with the second-movement Moderato
assai scarcely providing significant respite from the initial Moderato con moto. Rubinstein’s
Romanticism was deemed rather stultifying, especially by the composers who came
afterwards, and he himself was not always sure where he fit within 19th-century
composition circles – he produced both programmatic works and “pure music”
(this symphony is of the latter type), but tended to lack the intensity and
level of commitment of composers such as Brahms, of whom Rubinstein was not
particularly fond. The Sixth Symphony actually has three movements containing
the word “Moderato,” the finale being marked Moderato assai, and this helps show why Rubinstein’s music did not
have the staying power of that of some of his contemporaries. He seemed
unwilling to take a strong, personalized stance at a time when Romanticism led
to expectations that serious composers would delve deeply into themselves in
producing their works. The Sixth Symphony is certainly well-made, its third
movement (a Scherzo in all but name: it is marked Allegro vivace) being particularly propulsive. But the work as a
whole does not stay strongly with listeners after it is over. It is coupled on
this (+++) Naxos CD with Don Quixote
(1870), which follows the basic arc of Cervantes’ novel rather closely,
although without the wit and orchestral cleverness that Richard Strauss was to
bring to the same subject in 1897. Rubinstein called his Don Quixote not a tone poem but a Humoresque for Orchestra, and it is in fact somewhat on the
light-hearted side, despite the underlying seriousness of the picaresque novel
on which it is based. The performances on this CD – a re-release of readings
from 1985 and 1986 that originally appeared on the Marco Polo label – are solid
and substantial, although neither Gilbert Varga nor Michael Halász seems particularly entranced with
Rubinstein’s music. This is nevertheless a worthwhile release for listeners
interested in the work of a composer better known for his extraordinary success
as a concert pianist than as a substantial creator of music of lasting value.

January 09, 2014

Playful and endearing, Il
Sung Na’s A Book of Babies is
intended – well, for babies. Targeting children up to age three – a group
usually reached with board books rather than oversize hardcovers like this one
– the book is meant to be read by an adult, with Na’s pictures enjoyed by the
child as he or she listens to the simple story of animal parents with their new
babies. The animals are drawn anthropomorphically, with human-like gestures and
expressions, although Na’s text mostly gives accurate scientific information
about them. For example, when it comes to babies, the text points out, “some
can walk right away” – and the illustration shows adult zebras with a baby.
“Some are carried in their mommy’s pouch,” writes Na, showing a kangaroo mom
smiling at her wide-eye joey. “Some are carried in their daddy’s pouch,” Na adds, showing a seahorse family – portrayed in
an unrealistic but very pleasant rainbow of colors. The book ends at the end of
all the baby animals’ “very first day,” as all settle down to rest. A Book of Babies is a pleasant foray
into the animal kingdom, showing very young children creatures born with fur
(polar bears) and scales (lizards, shown – inaccurately – with the mother
lizard tending the hatchlings), in a nest (ducklings) or in water (fish), and
giving parents a chance to introduce very young children to books as well as to
non-human infants.

Na comments that the fish in
her book “have lots of brothers and sisters,” and that is precisely the issue
in Tatyana Feeney’s Little Frog’s Tadpole
Trouble. This book, for the slightly older age range of 2-5, features the
same sensibility and simple, amusing drawings found in Feeney’s Small Bunny’s Blue Blanket and Little Owl’s Orange Scarf. The primary
color in Feeney’s new book is, of course, green, although it is not mentioned
in the title; even the text is green – but bits of red enliven the otherwise
all-green illustrations in some very clever ways. Little Frog and his parents
really do not look like frogs at all, except in the vaguest way; but that
scarcely matters in a book that features Little Frog jumping rope, playing a
drum set and otherwise doing all sorts of un-froggy things. The topic of the
book is only frog-related on a superficial level: the subject is the difficulty
inherent in becoming a big sibling. Little Frog is happy that the family
consists only of himself and his parents, but then he learns that he is about
to become the big brother of nine – count them, nine – tadpoles. And he is not happy, since the only thing the
tadpoles do is “take up all of
Mommy’s and Daddy’s time.” Busy Mommy cannot read a bedtime story to Little
Frog, and infant-focused Daddy cannot give him a good-night kiss, because of
those “stupid tadpoles,” as Little Frog calls them. But Daddy points out that
Little Frog was once a tadpole himself, and the tadpoles will one day turn into
frogs just like him – and sure enough, that is what happens, so that Little
Frog soon enough finds himself with “nine new playmates,” to whom he is “the best big brother.” This is an even
bigger simplification of big-sibling-hood than is usual in kids’ books, but it
works well for the targeted age range, and the illustrations are so amusingly
silly that the message should go down easily. Little Frog’s Tadpole Trouble can be a wonderful book for a child
who is destined to become a big brother or sister perhaps a little before he or
she is quite ready to face the reality of what that means.